1
But I'm still thinking about beauty, how it is incidental and cannot be contrived. Perhaps this is why I've suddenly become obsessed by the loose strangeness of Leonardo Da Vinci's Adoration of Magi, which I recently re-encountered in a Ken Burns documentary
La pittura è mentale, Da Vinci said. Painting is a mental phenomenon. A few roughly sketched lines can evoke an entire world behind the viewer's eyes, but Da Vinci was more interested in the interior worlds of the faces on the canvas. He understood that emotion drives form.
"You must wander around," he wrote, "and constantly as you go, observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk, quarrel, laugh, or fight together. Make brief sketches in a notebook, for the movements of bodies are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them. So keep these sketches as your guides and masters."
Da Vinci's sketches of laughter and bickering in Florence's piazzas guided his Adoration. He was not interested in the presentation of Christ—he wanted to capture the reaction to the sudden appearance of the divine. Here are some of my favorite details:
There's a river of thinly painted figures, spectral among the yellow. The kings who worship at the infant's feet look humbled and reverent, but also haunted. Even the horses appear unsettled, ready to trample. I've counted at least fifty expressions in this painting, some richly shadowed and others brought to life by only a few lines. There is devotion, yes, but also overwhelm, disbelief, and maybe even fear on these faces.
And me? How would I react?
Hard to say. Although I feel like an alien whenever I enter a church, I admire how it shapes grief into a dignified spectacle. Swinging pots of incense and shuddering organs. Elaborate fabric and voices echoing across stone. Leonard Cohen was right when he said religion is the greatest work of art.
After two and a half years of struggling with his Adoration, Da Vinci abandoned it and went to Milan. I think it is his most beautiful painting because it is not finished.
2
When describing the trajectory of art, John Berger once said, "Tradition wins in the end." I'm not yet sure if this is true.
My grandmother's funeral took place in the same church where she was baptized in 1918. "Her life was coherent," the priest said as he swung a censer over her coffin. He was right. Although I did not know her well, my grandmother was tradition personified. Strictly westside Polish. Kielbasa and cabbage on Sundays, and fried smelt on Fridays. She had a succession of nine black Scottish terriers, each named Mitsy, and she lived in the same house for 75 years with the same furniture arrangement.
Here's a snapshot of my mom with her brothers circa 1960. On the back of the photo, my grandmother's spindly handwriting insists that "the smudges in this picture are on the film and not my living room." Half a century went by and the only thing that changed was the size of the television screen.
My life is not coherent. Choices compound and I will never have deep roots or generational memory. Fifteen years ago, a book reviewer called me "a perpetual interloper," and this phrase lingers because it's true. I crave novelty and flux, and I do not know if this reflects some inner discomfort or an ease with the world.
Perhaps like painting, beauty is also mental, and the best I can do is increase my capacity to recognize it.
3
The ability to find beauty, both backwards and forwards, is something I've learned from tonight's Very Special Guest, my friend Earl Carlson, who I've known in New Orleans, New York, and now the Middle West. Every month we challenge each other's taste by trading five songs based on themes like "camp" and "death". He's always fiddling with surprising projects and making genre-blurred music, such as this magnificent track that soundtracked my night flight to Vienna. (Here's his Instagram, but like everyone else in my life, I'm harassing him to use Bluesky instead; maybe he'll start doing things there if you follow him.)
Earl owns a pickup truck, enjoys telling me about professional wrestling, and almost every time we speak, he offers an observation about friendship or creativity that leaves me a little misty-eyed. When I asked him the Official Midnight Radio Question, he responded with a poem, which caught me off guard because I did not know Earl wrote poetry. And so: "Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?"
I’ve found my way to the river again
last winter I fell through the ice
many springs ago I couldn’t climb
up your muddy banks
so I let you carry me through the rapids
down towards your swimming holes
do you start or end
some nights I wonder of all the struggle
you’ve seen and caused
the wildfires licking at your hips
making ash of plans
I wonder of your torrents and your seasons
where nothing but cracked earth lay
baptisms and skinny dipping
and rainbow trout
we have seen and been
4
I do not understand poetry, so I asked Earl to explain his poem to me even though I know you're not supposed to do this. He sighed with the very specific mixture of exasperation and love that makes a friendship worthwhile. A few hours later, I received this explication of what we will hear tonight:
“So the gist of this is we start in a weird cosmic but grounded space that feels familiar but a bit strange. It's techno. It's dancy. It's leftfield. But also comfortable. It's our vibe right now. Or my vibe right now. I've always tried to make things that impress my friends, that resonate with my friends, but I also struggle with making 'normal' music. I find myself getting frustrated with the output. It's never quite what I hope it'll be. The artists in the first section of tonight's mix seem to be finding their own spaces. Things that feel real."
"I moved back to southeastern Michigan a couple years ago, and I think a lot about Berlin's techno scene being added to the UNESCO world heritage list—this feels like the erasure of something important, while honoring something else important."
"This year I tried my hand at making dub techno, but I struggled to be engaged. I found myself asking why? Why am I using this minor chord—what's beneath this? These subtle drums—am I making muzak or am I making something that sings?"
"Ras G passed away, and it hit home—not because I loved him, but because I recognized he was in our lineage: an SP-404 and a belief he could ride with the ancestors if he sampled them just right. Carlos Niño is doing the same but through a different lens, which tapped into something here. Mandré was a new find for me, from 1977, a decade before I was born, but he's here in the lineage. And my god, Gil Scott—this is the despair that sits as a partner to the cosmos. Any minority voice knows that despair, rage, anger, hopelessness is part and parcel along with the expansive hope and possibility of the cosmos. Black Atlantis."
"Cannibal Ox was my first touch of this vein, this river, this experience. It was them or Binary Star—I didn't know that rap could sound like this, or maybe that music could feel like this. These two projects were the doors for me. This mix is an answer to the question of whether I believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe."
"The written answer is: I don't know. What I do know is that stepping into this river, feeling the current—it feels right. For the first time, it feels like I'm part of a lineage. It's the horrors, it's the sorrow, it's the pain, it's a country, a separate lineage telling us that we aren't enough, that we need to show up differently. It's the joy, it's the community, it's the knowledge that my ancestors are singing spirituals, and before that singing in languages I don't know. It's knowing that after me there will be more."
"I know that I was raised looking up to a white Christ with a pastor telling me I'm born with sin. I looked for my own answers, searching desperately for meaning. Only now, as I raise my own part of this lineage am I starting to feel settled with the answer of 'I don't know but I want to swim in this river.'"
5
Tonight there will be no extravagant sheets of reverb or uncomfortably long slow-motion songs. Something gave me the sense that I should leave Earl's mix alone. Perhaps because there's such a strong sense of a rarefied vision within this sequence of songs. Or maybe because Earl sent me a fully mixed audio file and said, "You should leave it alone."
He's right. Sometimes there's nothing to do but step aside and let the music play.
- JakoJako & Rødhåd - Passeri/Helonias
In Vere • WSNWG, 2022 • Bandcamp - Lyder - Brack
Weird.fishes • tunnel.visions, 2025 • Bandcamp - Rrose - Rib Cage
Please Touch • Eaux, 2023 • Bandcamp - Skee Mask - Session Add
Compro • Ilian Tape, 2018 • Bandcamp - Polygonia - Ceaseless Motion
Ceaseless Motion • Timedance, 2026 • Bandcamp - The Upsetters - Super Ape
Super Ape • Black Ark, 1976 - Prince Far I & The Arabs - Final Chapter/Shake the Nation
Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III • Daddy Kool, 1980 • Bandcamp - Ras G - Been Cosmic
Back on the Planet • Brainfeeder, 2013 • Bandcamp - Sun Ra & His Arkestra - Door of the Cosmos
Sleeping Beauty • El Saturn, 1979 • Bandcamp - Carlos Niño & Friends - It's All Happening! (featuring Madlib, Jamire Williams and Dexter Story with strings by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson)
Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening! • Stones Throw, 2016 • Bandcamp - Mandré - Solar Flight (Opus I)
Mandré • Motown, 1977 - Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where the Hatred Is
Pieces of a Man • Flying Dutchman Records, 1971 • Wax Poetics - Cannibal Ox - Iron Galaxy
The Cold Vein • Definitive Jux, 2021 - Binary Star - Reality Check
Masters of the Universe • 2020 • Bandcamp - Wata Igarashi - Mineral
Mastery Quantum Sound • Houndstooth, 2026 • Bandcamp - Vince Staples and Lil Baby - East Point Prayer (Vocals only)
Ramona Park Broke My Heart • 2022 - Erykah Badu - Out of My Mind, Just in Time (Vocals only)
New Amerykah, Part Two (Return of the Ankh) • 2010
